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| April 19, 2014 |
Yesterday, as I was returning down the Assabet, paddling leisurely in the stern, the sun came out after two days of storm or louring weather and shone on the banks covered with snow. The water, which had been perfectly smooth all the afternoon, looked smoother yet, and I think that I never beheld so pure and refulgent a white as the upright snowy banks presented. Snow never looks so white in winter.
I had chosen to come to the river that afternoon, for there, the air being warm though the earth was covered with snow, there was least change. The few sparrows and warblers along the water's edge and on the twigs over the water seemed to forget the wintry prospect.
I was surprised to find the river so full of sawdust from the pail-factory and Barrett's mill that I could not easily distinguish if the stone-heaps had been repaired. There was not a square three inches clear. And I saw the sawdust deposited by an eddy in one place on the bottom like a sand-bank a foot or more deep half a mile below the mill.
A man was plowing in snow this morning.
This is the fifth day that the ground has been covered with snow. There first fell about four inches on the morning of the 15th. This had two thirds melted on the evening of the 16th. Then as much more fell on the 17th, with which to-night (evening of 19th) the ground is still more than half covered. There has been sleighing. I do not remember the like.
Within a few days the warblers have begun to come. They are of every hue. Nature made them to show her colors with. There are as many as there are colors and shades.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 19, 1854
I was surprised to find the river so full of sawdust from the pail-factory and Barrett's mill See April 1, 1854 ("The lines of sawdust from Barrett's mill at different heights on the steep, wet bank under the hemlocks rather enhance the impression of freshness and wild-ness, as if it were a new country.”); April 12, 1852 (" The lines of sawdust left at different levels on the shore is just hint enough of a sawmill on the stream above."); October 20, 1856 ("Land at Hemlocks, in the eddy there, where the white bits of sawdust keep boiling up and down and whirling round as in a pot.") July 7, 1859 ("Bathing at Barrett's Bay, I find it to be composed in good part of sawdust, mixed with sand.”)
A man was plowing in snow this morning. See April 2, 1853 (“Observed some plowing yesterday”); April 18, 1855 (“The frost is out enough for plowing probably in most open ground”); April 16, 1856 (“Plowing and planting are now going on commonly. . . . Frost appears to be out of most soil”)
This is the fifth day that the ground has been covered with snow. See note to April 2, 1861 ("A drifting snow-storm, perhaps a foot deep on an average.")
Within a few days the warblers have begun to come. See April 30, 1859 ("This first off-coat warmth just preceding the advent of the swamp warblers (parti-colored, red start, etc.) brings them out. I come here to listen for warblers, but hear or see only the black and white creeper and the chickadee."); May 18, 1856 ("The swamp is all alive with warblers about the hoary expanding buds of oaks, maples, etc., and amid the pine and spruce."); May 23, 1857 ("This is the time and place to hear the new-arriving warblers, the first fine days after the May storm. When the leaves generally are just fairly expanding,. . . then, about the edges of the swamps in the woods, these birds are flitting about in the tree-tops like gnats, catching the insects about the expanding leaf-buds")
Warblers – every hue.
There are as many as there
are colors and shades.
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau
"A book, each page written in its own season,
out-of-doors, in its own locality."
~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2024
tinyurl.com/hdt-18540419
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